Agree and Agreement : Evidence from Germanic

This paper contains a descriptive overview of morphological agreement phenomena in the Germanic languages. In addition it studies the relation of overt agreement with the underlying LF relation of Agree. It is argued that CHOMSKY’S (2000, 2001a) Probe-Goal Approach is not well suited to account for the nature of abstract Agree, although it is descriptively adequate for some instances of morphological agreement. The central claim of the paper is that Agree reduces to Merge, i.e. it is a precondition on Merge (and an integrated part of it). Thus, whenever Merge applies, the possibility of agreement arises, i.e. a language has to make a parametric choice whether or not to signal each instance of Merge/Agree morphologically. Hence, the extreme variation of agreement across languages, even within a relatively limited and a closely related group of languages, such as the Germanic ones. The claim that Agree reduces to Merge is coined as the Agree Condition on Merge. It is claimed that this simple condition is a law of nature, hence of language. In addition, it is suggested that Move is driven by the needs of Merge/Agree, moving features to the edge of a category Y, such that the edge matches some features of the object with which Y merges. The approach pursued also supports the view that labelling and X’-theoretic conceptions are theoretical artifacts that should be dispensed with. 1. Theoretical background CHOMSKY (2001a: 3) formulates his understanding of Agree as follows: We therefore have a relation Agree holding between α and β, where α has interpretable inflectional features and β has uninterpretable ones, which delete under Agree. In a clause like the Icelandic (1), the finite verb and the logical subject agree in number: (1) Það hafa komið hingað þrír málvísindamenn. 1 A preliminary version of this work was published in Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax (2002) 70: 101-156. Many warm thanks to Christer Platzack for insightful comments on that first version. For numerous and very fruitful discussions on agreement over the years, many thanks to Anders Holmberg. Thanks also to Cecilia Falk, Cedric Boeckx, Gunlög Josefsson, Jóhanna Barðdal, Josef Bayer, Lars-Olof Delsing, Verner Egerland. Finally, many thanks to Werner Abraham for his helpful comments and important support. I alone am responsible for the shortcomings of this work. 2 They are also both in the third person. However, third person is ‘absence of person’, [-1p, -2p], not ‘true person’ and hence no person agreement is involved (on Icelandic from this point of view, see SIGURÐSSON 1996 and subsequent work). For convenience, I use as short abbreviations in the glosses as possible: big capitals N, A, D, G for the cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive), small capitals M, F, N (masculine, feminine, neuter) for the genders, SG and PL for the numbers, 1, 2, 3 for the persons, AGR for unspecified agreement, IND, SUBJ for indicative vs. subjunctive, DEF, INDEF for definite vs. indefinite. 3 The participle komið ‘come’ takes a non-agreeing, default form when selected by hafa ‘have’ (see section 2.2.1). The default form is hompohonous with the agreeing N/A.N.SG form, but I refrain from giving irrelevant